Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow

Olga Shevchenko

Publication Year: 2009

In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga
Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how
people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new
identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging
from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this
study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new
dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

Expressions of gratitude, as Simmel reminds us, always leave an aftertaste of
inadequacy. No matter how much one appreciates a favor, there is always one
thing that remains impossible to reciprocate: the good will and spontaneity
that went into the initial act of kindness. ...

1. Introduction: Living on a Volcano

In the mornings, Lina’s bedroom serves as a playroom for her granddaughter. In
the evenings, it becomes a living room. This is where she and her husband receive
guests, socialize, watch TV. Sitting in this modestly furnished room with a
view onto a quiet Moscow yard, its hostess, a fifty- five-year-old retired chemical
engineer ...

2. How the Crisis of Socialism Became a Postsocialist Crisis

As is the case with the worlds we all inhabit, the first postsocialist decade was
shaped by developments of many decades, indeed centuries, that preceded it.
But the turning point that many Russians recognized as particularly critical to
the shaping of their present situation occurred in the mid-1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev’s
initiatives, ...

3. A State of Emergency: The Lived Experience of Postsocialist Decline

As one might expect, the face of crisis in everyday life differed markedly from
its description on the pages of the printed media. Of course, some points of
similarity remained. To start with the most signifi cant, the label of “crisis”
was used widely to describe a variety of diverse phenomena whether of a
macro-social ...

4. The Routinization of Crisis, or On the Permanence of Temporary Conditions

One objection to taking the notion of postsocialist crisis in good faith could
be the fact that in the course of the 1990s, this notion was applied simply too
broadly to be useful. To an extent, this criticism is accurate. After all, not only
was krizis a term of choice for describing one’s immediate experiences, but
it structured the very logic of assessing ...

5. Permanent Crisis, Durable Goods

To this point we have pursued a description of the total crisis framework in
terms of rhetoric, but we should certainly not dismiss it as “just rhetoric.” The
manner in which people discussed and imagined the postsocialist situation
mattered deeply. For one, it provided the context in which the need to think and
speak of oneself ...

6. Building Autonomy in Everyday Life

Household appliances were not the only means enlisted in the project
of constructing a cocoon of security around the household. A variety of practices
from realms as disparate as consumption, health behaviors, informal exchanges,
and everyday rituals all provided venues through which the uncertainty
of the postsocialist condition ...

7. What Changes When Life Stands Still

When one talks of coping or adapting, the assumption is that needs and infrastructural
deficiencies precede the actual adaptive responses and define the
form that they take. But there is every reason to look at what is usually classified
as adaptation in a less teleological fashion. While many postsocialist behaviors,
indeed, ...

8. Conclusion

This book is based on conversations that took place in the late 1990s, and now,
ten years later, this period seems both near and distant. It is near because it has
not been too long since my last interview was done; as I know from follow-up
phone calls and occasional meetings with some of my contacts, most of them
are in the same line of work, ...

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